Jeff HowardDesign Portfolio

CMU Parking Service Design

Parking is a scarce commodity at Carnegie Mellon University. This service design project focused on improving the flow of interaction with CMU's East Campus Parking Garage.

I worked on a team with three design researchers to understand the nature of parking on campus and design a series of improvements to the system.

The Problem

CMU's lone parking garage has 450 spaces, far fewer than of the number of students, faculty and staff that vie for parking on a daily basis. Even with the addition of 300 city parking meters around campus, the system is hard pressed to keep up with the normal flow of visitors, much less that generated by special events. This leaves permit holders frustrated and campus guests overwhelmed with an impersonal parking bureaucracy.

Our Approach

My team began with a broad survey of the parking situation. We explored the parking garage and surrounding meters and watched people paying for parking and hunting for their spots. We interviewed CMU faculty and students and members of the parking garage staff.

Our Solution

We documented an ecology of stakeholders and identified a framework of touchpoints within the overall parking system. From this research, we synthesized a series of moment concepts that could benefit the full range of parking customers.

Our primary design effort was focused on full-time permit holders, who are required to interact with the parking system on an ongoing basis. We outlined an expansion of the garage's special event valet service for permit holders that minimized the amount of time they were required to spend interacting with the garage facilities while making interactions with garage staff a more prominent part of the experience.